A year ago this month, President Donald Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people responsible for the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. When Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor who studies domestic political violence, heard about the pardons, he says he immediately thought it was “going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency.” The first year of Trump’s second term has been a blizzard of policies and executive actions that have shattered presidential norms, been challenged in court as unlawful, threatened to remake the federal government, and redefined the limits of presidential power. But Pape argues that Trump’s decision to pardon and set free the January 6 insurrectionists, including hundreds who had been found guilty of assaulting police, could be the most consequential decision of his second term. “There are many ways we could lose our democracy. But the most worrisome way is through political violence,” Pape says. “Because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump.” Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. On this week’s More To The Story, Pape talks with host Al Letson about how America’s transformation to a white minority is fueling the nation’s growing political violence, the remarkable political geography of the insurrectionists, and the glimmers of hope he’s found in his research that democracy can survive this pivotal moment in history. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: Bob, how are you today? Robert Pape: Oh, I’m great. I’m terrific. This is just a great time to be in Chicago. A little cold, but that’s Chicago. I was about to say, great time for you. I’m a Florida boy, so I was just in Chicago, I was like, let me go home. So Bob, I thought I would kind of start off a little bit and kind of give you my background into why I’m really interested about the things that we’re going to be talking about today, right after Charlottesville happened. When I look back now, I feel like it was such a precursor for where we are today. And also I think in 2016 I was looking back and it felt like… Strangely, it felt like Oklahoma City, the bombing in Oklahoma City was a precursor for that. Ever since then, I’ve just really been thinking a lot about where we are as a society and political violence in America. The origins of it, which I think are baked deeply into the country itself. But I’m also very interested on where we’re going, because I believe that leadership plays a big role in that, right? And so when you have leaders that try to walk us back from the edge, we walk back from the edge. When you have leaders that say charge forward, we go over the edge. And it feels like in the last decade or so we’ve been see-sawing between the two things. So let me just say that you are quite right, that political violence has been a big part of our country and this is not something that is in any way new to the last few years. And that’s also why you can think about this when you talk about 2016, going back to 1995, with the Oklahoma City bombing here and thinking about things from the right and militia groups and right-wing political violence. Because that in particular from the seventies through 2016, even afterwards of course, has been a big part of our country and what we’ve experienced. But I just have to say a big but here, it’s not just the same old story. Because starting right around 2016, it would’ve been hard to know this in 2016 and even really 2017, ’18 and ’19, you were there right at the beginning of a new layer, so to speak, of political violence that is growing. It’s not that the old layer went away, which is why it’s been a little bit, I think, mystifying and confusing for some folks, and that’s folks who even cover this pretty closely, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League and so forth. Because it took a few years before they started to see that there was some new trends emerging, growing political violence. It was getting larger. The old profiles of who was doing the violent attacks were starting to widen. And in many ways that’s scarier and more dangerous than if they’re kind of narrow because we like our villains to be monsters who are far away from us and they couldn’t possibly be living next door to us. Whereas the closer they come, the more edgy it feels. So what you’re really experiencing there is the very beginning of where I date the beginning of our shift to the era of violent populism. We’re in a new world, but it’s a world on top of the old world. The old world didn’t go away. No, no, no. It feels like the old world is really the foundation that this new house of violence has been raised around. All of that that happened in the past was the foundation. And then in 2016, 2017, some people would say 2014, in that timeframe, the scaffolding began to go up and then Trump gets into office and then suddenly it’s a full-blown house that now all of America is living in. Well, if you look at the attacks on African-Americans, on Jews and Hispanics, except for going all the way back to the 1920 race time, except for that, these large-scale attacks have clustered since 2016. Then we have the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, that’s the largest attack killing, mass killing of Jews ever in the United States. And then we have August, 2019, the attack at the El Paso Walmart killing more Hispanics in a day than has ever been killed in our country. So there’s a pointed wave, if you see what I mean here. And race is certainly playing a role. So when you say how does this tie to the old layer or the existing layer, one of the big foundations here is absolutely race. What’s really sad and really tragic is in this new era of violent populism, that’s a term I like to use because it’s not just the same old, but it’s not quite civil war. In this new era, we’ve seen things move from the fringe where they were bad but happened more or less rarely, to more the mainstream where they’re happening more and more. And our surveys show this, people feel very fearful right now, and there’s actual reason for that. That’s not just media hype. There have been more events. We see them and they are real. We really have a time here that people are, I’m sorry to say, concerned. And there’s reason to be concerned. Yeah, as you say, the thing that pops up in my mind is the fact that white supremacy, which I think for a long time held sway over this country. And then I think that white supremacy in a lot of ways always held onto the power. But there was a time where being a racist was not cool and looked down upon. And so racism, while still evident, still holding people down, it’s built into institutions, all of that. I’m not saying that racism was away, I’m just saying that expressing it openly is now in the mainstream. I mean, we just heard President Trump recently talking about Somalis- Absolutely, yeah. In a very… I mean, just straight up, there is no difference between what he said about Somalis than what a Klansman in the forties in front of a burning cross would say about Black people, like zero difference. Yeah. So the reason I think we are in this new era, because I think you’re right, putting your finger on the mainstreaming of fringe ideas, which we used to think would stay under rocks and so forth, and white supremacy clearly fits that bill. But what I think is important to know is that we are transitioning for the first time in our country’s history from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy. And social changes like that in other countries around the world, so I’ve studied political violence for 30 years in many countries around the world. Big social changes like that Al, often create super issues with politics, make them more fragile and often lead to political violence. Now, what’s happening in our country is that we’ve been going through a demographic change for quite some time. America up through the 1960s was about 85% white as a country. There was ebbs and flows to be sure. Well, that really started to change bit by bit, drip by drip in the mid 1960s, whereas by 1990 we were 76% white as a country. Today we’re 57% white as a country. In about 10 or 15 years, it depends on mass deportations, and you can see why then that could be an issue, we will become truly a white minority democracy for the first time. And that is one of the big issues we see in our national surveys that helps to explain support for political violence on the right. Because what you’re seeing Al, is the more we are in what I call the tipping point generation for this big demographic shift, the more there are folks on the right, and most of them Trump supporters, mega supporters, who want to stop and actually reverse that shift. Then there of course, once knowing that, there are folks on the left, not everybody on the left, but some on the left that want to keep it going or actually accelerate it a bit for fear that with the mega crowd you won’t get it, the shift will stop altogether. These are major issues and things that really rock politics and then can lead to political violence. Talk to me a little bit about January 6th, when that happened, I’m sure you were watching it on TV. Yeah. What were you thinking as all of it was kind of coming into play? Well, so I was not quite as surprised as some folks, Al. So on October 5th in Chicago, I was on the Talking Head show in Chicago, it’s called Chicago Tonight. So on October 5th, 2020, that was just after the Trump debate where he said to the Proud Boys, stand back, but stand by. Well, the Chicago folks brought me on TV to talk about that, and I said that this was really quite concerning because this has echoes of things we’ve seen in Bosnia with some other leaders that a lot of Americans are just not familiar with, but are really quite worrisome. And I said what this meant was we had to be worried about the counting of the vote, not just ballot day, the day of voting. And we had to be worried about that all the way through January 6th, the certification of the election. But you made a point earlier, Al, about the importance of leaders. This is part of the reason why it’s hard to predict. It’s not a precise science, political violence. I like to use the idea, the analogy of a wildfire when I give talks. When we have wildfires, what we know as scientists is we can measure the size of the combustible material and we know with global warming, the combustible dry wood that could be set afire is getting larger. So you know you’re in wildfire season, but it’s not enough to predict a wildfire because the wildfire’s touched off by an unpredictable set of triggers, a lightning strike, a power line that came down unpredictably. Well, that is also a point about political leaders. So it was really, I did see some sign of this that Donald Trump said too about the Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. And no other president had said anything like that ever before in our history, let’s be clear. And because of my background studying political violence, I could compare that to some playbooks from other leaders in other parts of the world. That said, even I wouldn’t have said, oh yeah, we’re 90% likely to have an event, because who would’ve thought Donald Trump would’ve given the speech at the Ellipse, not just call people to it, it will be wild. His speech at the Ellipse, Al, made it wild. You co-authored a pretty remarkable study that looked at the political geography of January 6th insurrectionists. Can you break down the findings of that paper? Yeah. So one of the things we know when we study as a scholar of political violence, we look at things other people just don’t look at because they just don’t know what’s important. We want to know, where did those people live, where’d they come from? And when you have indictments and then you have the court process in the United States, you get that as a fact. So now it does mean I had to have big research teams. There’s a hundred thousand pages of court documents to go through. But nonetheless, you could actually find this out. And we found out something stunning, Al, and it’s one of the reasons I came back to that issue of demographic change in America. What we found is that first of all, over half of those who stormed the capitol, that 1,576 were doctors, lawyers, accountants, white collar jobs, business owners, flower shop owners, if you’ve been to Washington DC, Al, they stayed at the Willard. I have never stayed at the Willard- Yeah. So my University of Chicago doesn’t provide that benefit. That is crazy to me because I think the general knowledge or what you think is that most of the people that were there were middle class to lower, middle class to poor. At least that’s what I’ve always thought. Yeah, it’s really stunning, Al. So we made some snap judgments on that day in the media that have just stayed with us over and over and over again. So the first is their economic profile. Whoa, these are people with something to lose. Then where did they come from? Well, it turned out they came from all 50 states, but huge numbers from blue states like California and New York. And then we started to look at, well, where are in the states are they coming from? Half of them came from counties won by Joe Biden, blue counties. So then we got even deeper into it. And what’s happening, Al, is they’re coming from the suburbs around the big cities. They’re coming from the suburbs around Chicago, Elmhurst, Schomburg. They’re not coming from the rural parts of Illinois. They’re coming… That’s why we call them suburban rage. They’re coming from the most diversifying parts of America, the counties that are losing the largest share of white population. Back to that issue of population change, these are the people on the front lines of that demographic shift from America is a white majority democracy, to a white minority democracy. These are the counties that will impact where the leadership between Republican and Democrat have either just changed or are about to change. So they are right on the front lines of this demographic change and they are the folks with a lot to lose. And they showed up, some took private planes to get there. This is not the poor part, the white rural rage we’re so used to hearing about. This is well off suburban rage, and it’s important for us to know this, Al, because now we know this with definitiveness here. So it’s not like a hand-wavy guess. And it’s really important because it means you can get much more serious political violence than we’re used to thinking about. Yeah. So what happens, let’s say if circumstances remain as they are, IE, the economy is not doing great, the middle class is getting squeezed and ultimately getting smaller, right? The affordability thing is a real issue. What wins? The first big social change that’s feeding into our plight as a country is this demographic social change. There’s a second one, Al, which is that over the last 30 years, just as we’re having this demographic shift to a white minority democracy, we have been like a tidal wave flowing wealth to the top 1%. And we’ve been flowing wealth to the top 1% of both Republicans and Democrats. And that has been coming out of the bottom 90% of both Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, both can be poorer and worse off. Whites can be worse off because of this shift of the wealth to the top 1%. And minorities can be worse off because of the shift. And you might say, well, wait a minute, maybe the American dream, we have social mobility. Well, sorry to say that at the same time, we’re shifting all this money to the top 1%, they’re spending that money to lock up and keep themselves to top 1%. It’s harder to get into that top 1% than it’s ever been in our society. And so what you see is, I just came back from Portland. What you see is a situation in Portland, which is a beautiful place, and wonderful place where ordinary people are constantly talking about how they’re feeling pinched and they’re working three jobs. Yeah. Just to make their middle, even lower middle class mortgages. I mean, this is what’s happening in America and why people have said, well, why does the establishment benefit me? Why shouldn’t I turn a blind eye if somebody’s going to attack the establishment viciously? Because it’s not working for a lot of folks, Al. And what I’m telling you is that you put these two together, you get this big demographic change happening, while you’re also getting a wealth shift like this and putting us in a negative sum society. Whoa, you really now have a cocktail where you’ve got a lot of people very angry, they’re not sure they want to have this shift and new people coming into power. And then on top of that, you have a lot of people that aren’t sure the system is worth saving. I really wanted to dive in on the polls that you’ve been conducting, and one of those, there seems to be a small but growing acceptance of political violence from both Democrats and Republicans. What do you think is driving that? I think these two social changes are underneath it, Al. So in our polls, just to put some numbers here, in 2025, we’ve done a survey in May and we did one in the end of September. So we do them every three or four months. We’ll do one in January I’m sure. And what we found is that on both sides of the political spectrum, high support for political violence. 30% in our most recent survey in September, 30% of Democrats support the use of force to prevent Trump from being president. 30%. 10% of Democrats think the death of Charlie Kirk is acceptable. His assassination was acceptable. These represent millions and millions of adults. That’s a lot of people, you see. What you’re saying is right, we’re seeing it. And I think what you’re really seeing here is as these two changes keep going, this era of violent populism is getting worse. Yeah, I mean, so I’ve seen that Democrats and Republicans are accusing each other of using violent rhetoric. So in your research, what’s actually more common in this modern area where we are right now, is it right wing or left wing on the violent rhetoric, but also who’s actually doing it? So we’ve had, just after the Kirk assassination, your listeners will probably remember and they can Google, we had these dueling studies come out almost instantly, because they’re kind of flash studies and they’re by think tanks in Washington DC. One basically saying there’s more right-wing violence than left. And one saying there’s more left-wing violence than right. Well, I just want your listeners to know that if you go under the hood, so my job is to be like the surgeon and really look at the data. You’re going to be stunned, maybe not so stunned, Al, because you live in the media, to learn the headlines and what’s actually in the content are very different. Both studies essentially have the same, similar findings, although slightly different numbers, which is they’re both going up. They’re both going up. So it’s really not the world that it was either always been one side or now it’s newly the other. So the Trump administration’s rhetoric, JD Vance is wrong to say it’s all coming from the left, but it’s also wrong to say it’s all coming from the right. Now, what I think you’re also seeing, Al, is that the politicians, if left to their own devices, rarely, I’m sorry to say do the right thing, they cater to their own constituents. But there’s some exceptions and they’ve been helpful, I think. There’s two exceptions I want to draw attention to, one who’s a Republican and one who’s a Democrat. On the Democratic side, the person who’s been just spectacular at trying to lower the temperature is Governor Shapiro. He’s a Democrat, the Governor of Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro has given numerous interviews public, where he has condemned violence on all sides. He’s recognizing, as very few others are, that it’s a problem on both sides. He personally was almost burned to death, only minutes from being burned to death with his family here back in April. So he knows this personally about what’s at stake and he has done a great job, I think in recognizing that here. Now on the Republican side, we have Erika Kirk and what Erika Kirk, of course the wife of Charlie Kirk who was assassinated did, was at Kirk’s funeral, she forgave the shooter. But let’s just be clear, she’s a very powerful voice here. Now, I think we need more of those kind of voices, Al, because you see, they really are figures people pay attention to. They’re listening to people like that. They have personal skin in the game and they can speak with sort of a lens on this few others can. But we need more people to follow in that wake and I wish we had that, and that can actually help as we go forward. And I’m hoping they, both of those people will do more and more events, and others who have been the targets of political violence will come out and do exactly the same thing. I want to go back a little bit to January 6th and just talk about those insurrectionists. So when President Trump pardoned them, what was going through your mind? That it was probably going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency. And I know I’m saying quite a bit. I know that he’s insulted every community under the sun many, many, many times. But the reason I’m so concerned about this, Al, is that there are many ways we could lose our democracy, but the most worrisome way is through political violence. You see, because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about, irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump. And already on January 6th, we collected all the public statements on their social media videos, et cetera, et cetera, in their trials about why those people did it. And the biggest reason they did it was Trump told them so, and they say this over and over and over again, I did it because Trump told me to do it. Well, now Trump has not forgiven them, he’s actually helping them. They may be suing the government to get millions of dollars in ‘restitution’. So this is going in a very bad way if you look at this in terms of thinking you’re going to deter people from fighting for Trump. And now of course others are going to know that as well on the other side. So again, this is a very dangerous move. Once he pardoned it, no president in history has ever pardoned people who use violence for him. Yeah. So you have the insurrectionist bucket. But there’s another bucket that I’ve been thinking about a lot and I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about this, and that is that under President Trump, ICE has expanded exponentially. Yep. The amount of money that they get in the budget is- Enormous. Enormous. I’ve never seen an agency ramp up, A, within a term, like so much money and so many people- It is about to become its own army. Right. And Al, what this means concretely is, we really don’t want any ICE agents in liberal cities in October, November, December. We don’t want to be in this world of predicting, well, Trump would never do X, he would never do Y. No, we’ve got real history now to know these are not good ways to think. What we just need to do is we need to recognize that when we have national elections that are actually going to determine the future of who governs our country, you want nothing like those agents who, many of them going to be very loyal to Trump, on the ground. We should already be saying, look, we want this to stop on October 1st to December 31st, 2026, and we want to have a clean separation, so there’s no issue here of intimidation. And why would you say that? It’s because even President Trump, do you really want to go down in history as having intimidated your way to victory? So I think we really need to talk about this as a country, Al. And we really want a clean break here in the three months that will be the election, the run-up to the election, the voting, and then the counting of the vote. In closing, one of the major themes of this conversation has been that America is changing into a white minority. The question that just keeps coming to mind to me is, as somebody who studies this, do you think that America can survive that transition? Well, I am going to argue, and I’m still a little nervous about it, but we are in for a medium, soft landing. Okay. One of the things we see is that every survey we’ve done, 70% to 80% of Americans abhor political violence. And that’s on both sides of the aisle. And I think in many ways there are saving grace and it’s why, Al, when we have public conversations about political violence, what we see in our surveys is that helps to take the temperature down. Because you might worry that, oh, we’ll talk about it, we’ll stir people up and they’ll go… It seems to be the other way around, Al, as best we can tell. That there’s 70% to 80% of the population that really, really doesn’t want to go down this road. They know intuitively this is just a bad idea. This is not going to be good for the country, for their goals. And so they are the anchor of optimism that I think is going to carry us to that medium soft landing here. I think we could help that more if we have some more politicians joining that anchor of optimism. They’re essentially giving voice to the 70%, 80%. And if you look at our no Kings protests, the number of people that have shown up and how peaceful they have been, how peaceful they have been, those are the 70% to 80%, Al. And I think that gives me a lot of hope for the future that we can navigate this peacefully. But again, I’m saying it’s a medium soft landing, doesn’t mean we’re getting off the hook without some more… I’m sorry to say, likely violence, yeah. Listen, I’ll take a medium. I would prefer not at all, but the way things are going, I’ll take the medium. Thank you very much. Bob, Professor Robert Pape, it has been such a delight talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time out. Well, thank you Al, and thanks for such a thoughtful, great conversation about this. It’s just been wonderful. So thank you very much.

On a dark November evening, I find myself outside one of the units at a garden-style apartment complex in Memphis, its parking lot alight in flashing blues and reds. The police are here—about a dozen cars—responding to reports of a violent crime. I’m accompanied by Mauricio Calvo, a 50-year-old local whose friend Diego lives here. Calvo knocks. “Soy yo,” he whispers at the door—“It’s me.” “I told him not to open the door under any circumstance,” he informs me. The door cracks open and Calvo nudges me through. I’m disoriented. It’s pitch-black inside, curtains drawn, lights off. Diego stands in the entryway, but I only see the outline of his body, not his face. Buenas noches, he whispers, and guides us to the living room. A little boy comes up beside me. “I wanna play!” he says in English, gesturing toward the TV and Xbox. Nobody turns it on. This family has nothing to do with the situation outside, but still they are hiding. Diego, not his real name, explains that when the police pulled into the lot earlier that night, he instinctively hit the floor as though dodging bullets. “We were afraid, because what we are feeling these days is immigration is everywhere,” he tells me in Spanish, voice shaking. He and his wife—a Dreamer whose parents brought her to the United States as a child—and three of their four kids, all US citizens, stayed that way about 10 minutes, flat on the ground in the dark. Then they called Calvo, who leads Latino Memphis, an organization that helps immigrants. “I got very scared they could start knocking on doors looking for the suspect and scared they would take him,” Diego’s wife says, nodding at her undocumented husband. She knew that where police go in Memphis, lately at least, there will be immigration officers, too. On September 29, the Trump administration launched the Memphis Safe Task Force, deploying, according to the Washington Post, some 1,700 federal officers from a mix of agencies, ostensibly to help the Tennessee Highway Patrol, the Memphis Police Department (MPD), and the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office crack down on crime. It’s one of many such task forces the administration has launched, or plans to launch, nationally. The MPD has reported success—large declines in serious crimes reported since the feds arrived. The feds are getting something out of the arrangement, too; local cops are chauffeuring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers around town, leaving many immigrant families afraid to leave their homes. Some refer to the task force as “the occupation” and say the feds are using the crime issue as a Trojan horse. “I feel nervous—I have to protect them and myself,” Diego’s 12-year-old daughter tells me as she sits beside her parents in the dark. “I’ve lived here for a long time,” Diego adds, “and I’ve never seen so many police cars.” Neither have I. Though I’m new to Memphis, I’ve been reporting on the criminal justice system for more than a decade and have spent time in cities with a lot of law enforcement. I’ve also lived in an authoritarian country overseas, yet I’ve never experienced a police presence like this. Some Memphians critical of the surge liken the city to a war zone, with helicopters circling over neighborhoods, National Guard officers patrolling downtown, and unmarked law enforcement vehicles in the streets. Immigrant citizens carry their US passports, lest they be detained. One volunteer I spoke with compared the vibe to 1930s Germany. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, has welcomed the task force, and Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, has cooperated, crediting the effort for reducing 911 calls about gun violence. But Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, another Democrat, compares occupied Memphis to a failed state. “Our risk is that [America is] gonna become a Yemen or a North Korea, or something else altogether, where there is an armed individual with a semi-automatic weapon and military fatigues on many corners,” he told me. “There may be zero crime, but we also won’t be leaving our houses. I know that’s a dark scenario, but that’s kind of where we are.” My hours spent in the dark with Diego’s family—and talking with local activists, teachers, businesspeople, and residents—revealed how the militarized federal onslaught is reshaping daily life in blue cities like Memphis, keeping kids out of school and parents from work, and turning grocery shopping into a mission that risks one’s family being torn apart. When I finally left Diego’s complex that night, a police cruiser whipped past, lights and siren blaring, followed by another, and another—more than 20 in all—racing off to terrorize another neighborhood. Andrea Morales/MLK50 I had arrived in town three days earlier, hoping to document a local surge of federal law enforcement that hadn’t received nearly as much attention as those in cities like Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles. That’s partly because the residents of Memphis—a blue city in a deeply red state—have not responded with the same headline-grabbing protests. There are no inflatable frogs, no sandwich-hurling federal employees, no throngs of demonstrators trying to block ICE vehicles. The thinking, Calvo speculates, is that “less resistance will make these people less interested in being here, and they will just move on. It’s like, why poke the bear?” But that doesn’t mean there’s no resistance, or that locals appreciate the expansive police presence. I meet up with Maria Oceja, 33, who recently quit her job at a court clerk’s office. She’s offered to drive me around to show me how pervasive the task force presence has become. It doesn’t take long. Shortly after we set out, we see two highway patrol vehicles on the side of the road. Then a police car, then another. “Look, we got an undercover over there,” she tells me, gesturing toward an unmarked car that’s pulled someone over.  Oceja, who sports a pink nose ring and has a rosary hanging from her rearview, co-leads Vecindarios 901, a neighborhood watch with a hotline to report ICE sightings. She’s exhausted: They’ve been averaging about 150 calls a day since the task force took shape in late September. The group has documented home raids, too, but traffic stops are the most common way ICE rounds people up. The highway patrol will pull over Black and Hispanic drivers for minor violations like expired tags or a broken taillight, or seemingly no violation at all: “‘You got over too slow. You’re going one or two miles over [the speed limit].’ Just anything!” says Tikeila Rucker of Free the 901, a local protest campaign. Then immigration officers, either riding shotgun or following behind in their own vehicles—or, occasionally, vehicles borrowed from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency—swoop in. In one stop I witnessed, three Black friends were pulled over for their car’s tinted windows; one of them, from the Bahamas, was sent to ICE detention. The car’s owner, Keven Gilles, was visiting from Florida. He told me that he’d been pulled over five times in a week and a half in Memphis, and “every time, there’s at least five more cars that come, whether that be federal agents, more troopers, or regular city [police] cars.” Memphis is the nation’s largest majority-Black city, with more than 600,000 people in all. Ten percent are Latino and 7 percent are immigrants. The biggest contingent hails from Mexico—according to the Memphis Restaurant Association, the city has more Mexican restaurants than barbecue joints—but there are also well-established communities from China, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Vietnam, and Yemen, and more recently Nicaragua, Ukraine, and Venezuela. Oceja, whose parents immigrated from Mexico, says the city’s undocumented population is relatively young—lots of families with school-age children. She takes me to Jackson Elementary, which she attended as a child, to ask employees about how the policing surge has affected this immigrant-heavy neighborhood. “I’ve been here 22 years, and I’ve never seen it this bad,” PE teacher Cassandra Rivers tells me. Because people are afraid of being detained while dropping off their kids, the Memphis-Shelby County School Board has agreed to create more bus routes. Meanwhile, daily attendance is down at least 10 percent at Jackson, Rivers says. Some students are so anxious that she has started calling their homes in the afternoon just to assure them that their parents are safe and sound. Earlier, on Jackson Avenue, we’d passed a parking lot with a few men standing around. “This is where the day laborers come and ask for work,” Oceja told me. There are fewer lately, now that officers are pulling over contractors’ trucks and arresting workers at construction sites. “Prior to the occupation,” she explains after we leave the school and turn onto Getwell Road, “you could see immigrant vendors every morning on this street selling food.” We drive by shuttered fruit stands and yet another police car, then stop at a gas station, where I meet Jose Reynoso, a Guatemalan man selling tamales and arroz con leche out of a pickup truck. He says he doesn’t know how long his business will survive—customers are afraid to come out. At Supermercado Guatemala 502 on Summer Avenue, manager Rigoberto Cipriano Lorenzo gestures at empty aisles and recalls how packed his store used to be. Alex Lopez, a barber down the block, says many clients ask him to cut their hair at home now. Religious leaders are worried, too. A local imam told me members of his congregation are asking whether they must pray at the mosque, or can they do so from home? The county courthouse is overwhelmed. In its first six weeks, the task force conducted nearly 30,000 traffic stops, issued 25,000 citations, and made more than 2,500 arrests—creating a six-month backlog in traffic court, one attorney told me. That’s not including stops made by federal agents operating solo. An FBI agent speaking to a local rotary club noted that as long as the task force is operating, just about everyone in Memphis can expect to be pulled over at some point. (The latest, just-released figures show more than 4,000 arrests and nearly 200 people charged by the feds.) Jail overcrowding had resulted in detainees sleeping on mats on the floors, so the county declared a state of emergency and moved some of them to another location. “I don’t know how many times I have to say it, but the jail is at a horrific state right now,” Sheriff Floyd Bonner told ABC24 reporters during my visit. “We hear stories,” County Mayor Harris told me, of “individuals that are standing for 24 hours straight because there’s no room, or place for them to sit down. I don’t have the words for what’s happening over there.” Task force personnel near the intersection of Jackson Avenue and North Hollywood Street in Memphis, November 18, 2025.Andrea Morales/MLK50 In his darkened living room, blocked off from the glow of police cruisers outside, Diego speaks in hushed tones as he shares his story. I sit on a sofa beside his 6- and 16-year-old sons. He sits on another sofa, flanked by his wife and their 12-year-old daughter. Diego grew up in a small town in Chiapas, Mexico, where he worked as a farmer. He moved to the United States in 2004, at age 20, for more money and “a better future.” His sister’s husband lived in Memphis, so he settled there too, finding a landscaping job. It paid much better than he was used to, though the weather could be brutal, “very cold,” and he missed the food from back home. In 2006, he met his future wife, also from Mexico, who was selling tamales outside a convenience store. Their first son was born in 2007. Three years ago, they moved into this housing complex, eager for independence from their in-laws, with whom they’d been living. Today Diego works as a cook and janitor at a school where his wife is an assistant teacher. The Memphis Safe Task Force has affected the family’s routines in too many ways to count. Diego has a heart condition and needs to see a doctor every three weeks for monitoring—he was hospitalized not long ago. But he’s afraid to go to his next appointment, drive his kids to school, or commute to work. He’s heard about people getting pulled over for nothing. Immigrants are getting picked up despite having work permits or pending green cards—even people a decade into the legal residency process with just one hearing to go. Diego would have little chance to avoid deportation if he were pulled over. “I get very nervous, like shaky and sweating,” he says of his drives. His daughter, whom I’ll call Liliana, listens quietly as her father talks, gripping a blanket to her chest. Even though she’s a citizen, she has had to be vigilant about law enforcement, she says: “If I do a wrong movement, that would bring them here.” It’s very tiring. At school recently, a teacher asked her to complete a project that involved sharing personal information like her age and why her parents came to Memphis. “I got worried. Why are they asking those types of questions? I feel like it was a trap and they are trying to take information to them”—ICE—she tells me. Liliana is an intelligent, curious kid. She wants to be a nurse someday, Diego told me, which requires doing well in school. But she decided not to turn in her project, just to be safe: “I feel kind of overprotective,” she explains.  As Liliana talks, I try to remember she’s only in sixth grade. I ask her what she likes to do for fun. “Exploring,” she says, and shopping at the mall, but lately she spends most of her time at home. It’s not always pleasant; there’s a clogged sewer line, so the toilet keeps overflowing and flooding the bedrooms, and the property manager hasn’t fixed it. She watches TV trying to fend off cabin fever, and dreams of going on outings with her whole family, maybe to the park, grilling some food. “Most of the time I can’t go out,” she says, “because I’ll be scared.” A Customs and Border Patrol helicopter circles a community protest against an xAI data center development.Andrea Morales/MLK50 The Trump administration has used crime as a pretext to conduct its immigration operations, even in cities where crime is lower than it’s been in decades. In Memphis, it was at a 25-year low before the task force began. But most locals I spoke with said it’s still a problem: In 2024, Memphis had one of the nation’s highest rates of violent crime, higher than similarly sized cities such as Detroit or Baltimore. In six weeks, the Memphis Safe Task Force said it seized 400 illegal guns, and that, compared with the same period in 2024, robberies had dropped 70 percent, and murders were down from 21 to 12. The cops I encounter around town seem eager to emphasize the public safety aspect of their work, and markedly less eager to discuss immigration enforcement. At a gas station where I stop to refuel, I approach Sheriff’s Sgt. Jim Raddatz, a 32-year veteran who, along with federal task force officers, has just finished arresting someone—a criminal case, he says. Sitting in his cruiser, Raddatz tells me he appreciates the expanded police presence, as the sheriff’s office has lost some 300 patrol deputies in recent years. MPD has about 2,000 officers, and 300 highway patrol officers were diverted to the task force. Given the roughly 1,700 officers from more than a dozen federal agencies participating, the total for Memphis proper—even without sheriff’s deputies, who also police Shelby County—would be about 6.5 cops per 1,000 residents, a ratio more than triple the average for cities of this size. When I mention that I’ve heard the task force has made more than 300 noncriminal immigration arrests, he gets a tad defensive. “That might come from ICE. That’s not from us,” Raddatz says. He has neighbors who are immigrants, he explains, and wouldn’t want the sheriff’s office to target them: “All this ‘targeting, targeting, targeting’—we get sick of hearing about it, because we’re not,” he adds. “I understand they’re upset”—people see stuff on TikTok and other social media about immigration enforcement, and they get scared, “but it ain’t coming from us.” The sheriff’s office and the MPD, unlike the highway patrol, cannot conduct immigration arrests independently; for that they would need a special type of 287(g) agreement, the arrangements that govern local law enforcement cooperation with ICE. (The sheriff’s office can hold immigrants inside the jail under another type of 287(g) agreement.) But even if they can’t arrest immigrants, the local agencies are assisting with Trump’s deportation agenda by allowing federal agents to tag along on crime-related work—during traffic stops, the feds can legally ask for proof of citizenship, which inevitably leads to noncriminal immigration arrests. The federal officers I encountered while driving around town were similarly tight-lipped on immigration, and much chattier when talking about crime. At one point, I sat in my car watching some of them search for a sex offender at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac. One of the officers—who drove an unmarked vehicle—approached me. Don’t worry, he said, we’re just here “getting the bad guys.” They didn’t find their culprit, but their presence had ripple effects. After they left, I met an 18-year-old Hispanic man who lived next door to the house where the alleged sex offender was believed to be staying. He told me his immigrant mom was still inside—terrified—after the officers, looking for the perpetrator, had pounded on her door. She didn’t open it, and thankfully they left her alone. A traffic stop at Jackson Avenue and North Hollywood Street, November 18, 2025:.Andrea Morales/MLK50 In another neighborhood, I meet an 11-year-old named Justin. He’s standing outside his house, his dog and a soccer ball in the front yard. His mom is inside. It’s time for school. He carries a black camo backpack with a little tag on it; whoever picks him up at the end of the day will need a matching tag, and it won’t be his mom. Task force officers had come by the house a couple of weeks earlier with a warrant for a criminal suspect. That person no longer lived there, so instead they took Justin’s dad, an immigrant from Mexico who was undocumented. “A lot” changed after that, Justin tells me. As we talk, he squeezes some green slime that seems to function more as a stress ball than a toy. His mom, from Honduras, is afraid to emerge, even to shop for groceries. “She always stays at home,” he says quietly. “Before, she would usually go to the store.” With many immigrants in this mother’s situation, local volunteers have started delivering food. On a single day in October, 120 families reached out to the Immigrant Pantry, a project of Indivisible Memphis that normally serves about 50 families a week. Some other food pantries, especially those that accept government funding, require ID. This one doesn’t. “It blew up a few weeks ago,” says volunteer Sandy Edwards, whose T-shirt reads “Have Mercy.” “It’s about as sad as you can possibly imagine.” Edwards and her peers have seen a lot. There was the immigrant mother who resorted to feeding her baby sugar water—she didn’t have formula. Another was stuck in a motel room with four kids under 6, all citizens, and nothing to eat. Vecindarios 901, the neighborhood watch group, told me about a woman who called in tears because she couldn’t find her boyfriend; he’d been detained by ICE, leaving her in charge of his 3-year-old daughter. In another case, an undocumented mother begged agents outside a gas station to take her instead of her partner, who had a work permit, but they went for him anyway and left her with the baby and no means of support. The pantry volunteers drop off onetime emergency food and supplies to these desperate caregivers: canned goods, tortillas, diapers, plus $50 per family worth of fresh produce and meat. They organize the deliveries on Signal, an encrypted messaging app, and vet potential drivers online; the goal is to ensure they’re not in cahoots with the feds, who could use the delivery addresses to arrest people. “This is a vulnerable population,” notes Jessica Wainfor, another volunteer. “We cannot make mistakes.” A day before I visited, news broke that DHS was considering hiring private contractors to ferret out undocumented immigrants’ home and work addresses, bounty-hunter style—with bonuses for accuracy, volume, and timeliness. The volunteers asked me not to disclose their pantry location and said they were taking other precautions, like varying the stores where they shop and watching for unmarked vehicles that might be tailing them. It’s not only low-income immigrants who are afraid. At a Palestinian-owned café, I met Amal Arafat, a naturalized citizen from Somalia who moved to the United States at age 4. Now she lives in Germantown, an affluent suburb, and carries her US passport with her in case she’s pulled over for having dark skin and wearing a hijab. When I ask how this makes her feel, she starts to cry. “It’s a scary time, because there are people with citizenship being snatched away,” she says. She wonders whether the task force will really reduce violence—or just people reporting it. If she were a crime victim, I ask Arafat, would she call 911 now? “It does blur the lines of who is here to protect me, and who is here to terrorize and target me,” she replies. It’s a fair question. Back in October, Mayor Harris had told me that Latina survivors of domestic violence were not reaching out to a Shelby County program that helps them file for protective orders against their alleged assailants. “We know domestic violence hasn’t gone away, and we know Latina victims haven’t gone away,” he says. “What has gone away is their willingness to go to a public building and ask for help.” A Memphis pastor told me a story I have not corroborated about a local Guatemalan man who was beaten and stabbed but didn’t call 911 because he was afraid of being deported. Instead, he went home to heal, developed an infection, and died. It never made the papers. Harris, like many task-force critics, suspects violent crime is down primarily because all the police activity has made people reluctant to get out and about, for fear of getting stopped and harassed. What happens when the feds pack up and the task force dissolves? “I don’t think this is a long-term solution, and it’s making things really bad,” Calvo, Diego’s friend, told me. “You can pick your lane: This is really bad for the economy. Or this is really bad for our democracy. Or this is really bad for people’s wellbeing.” We need “fully funded schools. Money for violence intervention programs. Money for the unhoused community. A better transportation system,” adds local activist Rucker. “There are a lot of things we need—not more bodies that are gonna inflict more harm, pain, and trauma on an already traumatized community.” “This is not making us safer,” concurs Karin Rubnitz, who volunteers with Vecindarios 901 and shuttles Justin, the 11-year-old with the tag on his backpack, to school. “They are destabilizing the immigrant community.” Memphis may be a harbinger. On my last day in town, the Trump administration announced a similar task force in Nashville, where the highway patrol teamed up with ICE in May to arrest nearly 200 immigrants in a week. Other task forces were dispatched around the same time in Indianapolis, Dallas, and Little Rock, Arkansas—all purportedly focused on crime but co-led by DHS. More than 1,000 local law enforcement agencies nationwide are collaborating with ICE through 287(g) agreements. And the feds have launched their own immigration enforcement operations in cities from Chicago to Minneapolis. Tennessee Gov. Lee has said the task force in Memphis will continue indefinitely, despite the cost of bringing in hundreds of federal cops, housing them in hotels, and hiring extra judges to tackle the strain on local courts. (“We’re going to be millions of dollars in the red because of this,” Mayor Harris told the Washington Post.) Weeks into the occupation, so many immigrants are trying to self-deport that Calvo’s Latino Memphis now invites Mexican consulate officials to its office once a month to help process passports. “For the first time in the 17 years that I have worked here, we’re getting calls of people saying, How do I leave? And that is just devastating,” he says. Arafat’s husband, Anwar, an imam, told me his family is considering a move to a different part of the United States. “The people that are supposedly eliminating crime are making the city unlivable,” he says. “I really don’t want to leave,” their son Aiman, a high school freshman, told me. “I have a life here, a really good life.” Andrea Morales/MLK50 Back in the dark living room, Diego has a question for me. When will this all be over? Almost everyone I meet in Memphis asks the same thing. I have no answer, of course. If the task force carries on much longer, Diego says, he may have to return to Mexico and take his family with him. I ask Liliana how she feels about that. “Kind of sad and kind of happy,” the girl says. “I kind of want to be somewhere I feel safer. I can explore more, go more places.” It took a while, but my eyes have finally adjusted to the dark. Diego, clad in a T-shirt, is sitting beneath a joyous wedding portrait in which he sports a pink tuxedo and holds his wife’s hand. Now his hands are rubbing his head; he’s tense and exhausted. “I feel like my kids live here better than they would in Mexico, so I would like for them to stay, but if things continue to deteriorate, I don’t know what we will do,” he says. “I am more scared in the last month than in the last 20 years,” he adds. When the cops came, “I thought they were gonna kick down the door and take me away.” Diego suddenly realizes how long we’ve been talking. The police are still outside, but he figures maybe by now it’s safe to turn on a flashlight and make dinner for his family. He bids me a polite farewell, guides me out of the apartment, and closes the front door, upon which every knock brings a sense of dread.

Phillip Abram, a Jewish Bondi resident, places flowers at a growing memorial near Bondi Beach following the Bondi Hanukkah terror attack.James West/Mother Jones

On Tuesday, California voters passed Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s congressional redistricting proposal in response to Texas Republicans’ gerrymandered map, by a sweeping 28-point margin. As I reported in October, high-profile Democratic politicians—including former President Barack Obama—were front and center in an advertising blitz to pass the measure, which would tilt five seats in the House of Representatives towards Democrats. But on the ground in California, often with less media coverage, were legions of campaigners with civil rights and racial justice organizations, many of which tirelessly championed Prop 50 in the final weeks before the election—and are now celebrating its passage as a small step in the long fight for Black political representation. > “We understood that it was critical to counter what Donald Trump was trying to > do in Texas.” “There has been a long and steady march to kind of erode our voting rights,” said Phaedra Jackson, NAACP’s vice president of unit advocacy and effectiveness, reflecting on the conservative Supreme Court’s continuing attacks on the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 2013, the Court eliminated the formula for preclearance, the mechanism by which the VRA prevented certain states and localities from passing discriminatory election laws; six years later, another ruling enabled partisan gerrymandering on a hugely expanded scale. In the years since, the turnout gap between white voters and voters of color has grown—and it’s done so nearly twice as fast in counties that were previously subject to preclearance, according to the progressive nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice. “A lot of folks have framed this as a partisan issue,” Jackson said. “We see it [as] an attack on the ability for Black folks and folks of color to actually have representation.” “You see what’s happened in Missouri, in Texas,” she added, pointing to states where minority representatives, such as Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver and Texas Reps. Marc Veasey, Jasmine Crockett, and Joaquin Castro, all Democrats, were drawn out of their districts, and where the voting power of Black and Latino communities is being diluted. While local chapters of the organization continue to challenge the constitutionality of those maps in court, its goal in California “is to be a counterbalance.” That’s what led the NAACP, in the weeks leading up to the election, to become one of the measure’s biggest direct supporters, including by door-knocking and deploying hundreds of poll monitors across the state. The California Black Power Network, a coalition of 46 grassroots organizations across 15 counties, entered the fray later in the cycle. “We understood that it was critical to counter what Donald Trump was trying to do in Texas,” said Kevin Cosney, the coalition’s chief program officer. But the group waited until it could review the proposed new map—and judge its impact on Black voter representation—before entering the campaign.  Although Proposition 50 would mean 48 of California’s 52 House seats would now likely go to Democrats, the geographic and racial representation of its map is similar to the previous one drawn by the state’s independent redistricting committee, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. When it was convinced that Black voter representation and seats historically held by Black representatives were secure, the coalition’s members reached a consensus to support the measure through phone banking, canvassing, community events and ads.  For Newsom, and many of the measure’s backers in Sacramento, Prop 50’s massive success means it’s time to chalk a win. For racial justice campaigners like Jackson, it’s just “triaging a hemorrhaging situation”—even now, the Supreme Court is considering a Louisiana case that’s likely to further erode voting rights—that needs “long-term systemic fixes” like the decade-old John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which was reintroduced in Congress this summer. Cosney echoed the need for systemic change. While Prop 50 “sets the stage for what is potentially possible,” he said, “we still have to organize and do the work … to make sure that those districts that have been built out are filled by folks who have our best interest in mind.” “This was the kind of first opportunity that Californians really had to swing back,” said Cosney. “But it’s not the last.”

After weeks of delays, protests, and threats of arrests, the Republican-led Texas House on Wednesday passed a highly contentious redistricting plan that could give the GOP five additional seats in the US House. “This is racial gerrymandering at its worst. It is something that Jim Crow would be proud of, but it is something that John Lewis would be ashamed of,” Rep. Al Green told Mother Jones during the House proceedings, “That Dr. King would be ashamed of that. The former president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was from the state of Texas, would be ashamed of it.” As my colleague Ari Berman wrote, the Trump-backed plan amounts to an effort to “rig the midterm elections before a single vote has been cast.” More than 50 Texas Democrats fled the state for nearly two weeks to delay the vote’s proceedings, prompting Gov. Greg Abbott to threaten Democrats with arrest. But Texas Democrats had no other choice but to leave the state to prevent Trump’s Texas takeover. Here’s what former Attorney General Eric Holder told Ari: > “In this moment of democracy survival, people need to be prepared to do > anything in order to ensure that our constitutional system of government > continues to exist,” former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder told me on > Monday. “The authoritarian move that was dictated to Texas by the White House > needs to be opposed by any means necessary.” The Democratic protest eventually came to a close as Democrats returned to Austin on Monday. But new drama quickly unfolded, with Republicans prohibiting Democrats from leaving the Capitol building unless they were accompanied by a police escort. Rep. Nicole Collier refused these terms and was forced to stay on the House floor for two days. “Those of you who feel like this is okay, get ready for the fight,” said Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins during her dissent. “Because the fight ain’t over. It’s not over until we’ve energized America to save Democracy.”

After weeks spent out-of-state in an effort to deny Texas Republicans a quorum for an extreme redistricting plan—designed at Donald Trump’s behest to give the GOP a five-seat advantage in the House of Representatives—the state’s Democrats are still refusing to back down. After the Democrats’ departure, Gov. Greg Abbott went as far as signing arrest warrants for the absent lawmakers—and when several of the Democratic legislators returned on Monday to Austin, the state capital, they were immediately met with GOP retaliation. On Monday, Republican House Speaker Dustin Burrows ordered that the returning lawmakers could only leave the House floor with written permission and a 24-hour police escort until the House reconvened on Wednesday. While many of her colleagues agreed to these terms, Democratic state Rep. Nicole Collier stood her ground. State Reps. Gene Wu and Vince Perez, who reportedly signed the agreement, joined Collier in her protest. She’s now suing the state legislature for unlawful imprisonment. “If you leave the Capitol,” House Administration Committee Chair Charlie Geren told Collier, according to the lawsuit, “you are subject to arrest.” On Monday night, state Reps. Collier, Wu, and Perez, who were among the returning Democrats, slept propped up on leather swivel chairs on the state House floor. > This was my night, bonnet and all, in the #txlege. #thisisme > pic.twitter.com/46YgqbMUk8 > > — Nicole Collier (@NicoleCollier95) August 19, 2025 If the GOP redistricting plan succeeds, it would not only help the party maintain its narrow control of the House in the 2026 midterm elections, but would also guarantee the disenfranchisement of Black voters, of whom Texas has more than any other state. > View this post on Instagram > > > > > A post shared by Mother Jones (@motherjonesmag) “My constituents sent me to Austin to protect their voices and rights,” Collier said according to ABC. “I refuse to sign away my dignity as a duly elected representative just so Republicans can control my movements and monitor me with police escorts.” She added, “My community is majority-minority, and they expect me to stand up for their representation. When I press that button to vote, I know these maps will harm my constituents—I won’t just go along quietly with their intimidation or their discrimination.” > It was very cold spending on the #txlege Floor! Rep. @VinceMPerez & I joined > @NicoleCollier95 in support of making #GoodTrouble! We know this is a > #riggedredistricting process. Democrats are not giving up! Thanks for the > support, standing with @TexasHDC, & we have coffee! pic.twitter.com/wlQTpYINTY > > — Gene Wu (@GeneforTexas) August 19, 2025 Several of Collier’s fellow representatives supported her refusal to sign the agreement, including Rep. Sheryl Cole, who was threatened with arrest by her police escort after he lost track of her on her morning walk. It appears that Collier is still trapped inside Texas’s State Capitol, as an ongoing livestream records her movements on the state House floor. > Rep. Collier in House Chamber Live https://t.co/NOIIzgRYMK > > — Nicole Collier (@NicoleCollier95) August 19, 2025

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners will be the first movie on a streaming platform that will also be available in Black American Sign Language at the time of its digital release when it hits HBO Max on the Fourth of July. “By amplifying Black Deaf voices and honoring the culture, identity, and history at the heart of this powerful film, Max’s ongoing commitment to accessibility builds off a growing ASL program,” reads a press release from Warner Bros Discovery, HBO Max’s parent company. Black American Sign Language is distinct from American Sign Language—and it developed because Black Deaf students were segregated in their own Black schools for the Deaf. Around eight percent of Deaf people in the US are Black, but not all have access to learning BASL due to ASL being more widely taught now. Franklin Jones, Jr., a lecturer in deaf studies at Boston University, has compared BASL to African American Vernacular English, describing it as: > Compared to those who use standard ASL, BASL signers are sometimes seen as > less animated, Jones says. There are fewer mouth movements (a feature known as > facial grammar) in BASL, for example. In other ways, though, it’s perhaps more > expressive. The sign space for BASL users tends to be higher, closer to the > forehead, and generally wider overall, whereas standard ASL tends to be > farther down and to rely on tighter, more economical choices. People fluent in > BASL also tend to use both hands for signs that might require only one in > standard ASL. Still, BASL is not a monolith. As with any language, there are > noticeable dialects and regional accents.  The film, set in 1932, follows two Black twin brothers, both played by Michael B. Jordan, who return to their hometown in Mississippi, when they have to face a supernatural force. The 1930s were definitely a time period where BASL was more common among Black Deaf people who had access to sign language education. Writer Ashley C. Ford remarked on BlueSky that she had once seen director Coogler sign with another person who he noticed was wearing hearing aids, though it is unclear whether Coogler speaks BASL, ASL or both. > When I met Ryan Coogler several years ago, we were standing in a group of > people chatting, when a woman with visible hearing aids walked up, and he > casually began to sign the whole conversation so she could participate. She > mouthed “thank you”. He nodded and just kept doing his thing. > > [image or embed] > > — Ashley C. Ford (@smashfizzle.bsky.social) June 30, 2025 at 2:38 PM “The release of SINNERS with BASL is a major step forward in accessibility, representation, and visibility in streaming,” the press release also noted.

Dr. Emily Hawes-Van Pelt, an OB-GYN working in Minneapolis, didn’t consider herself an expert on fighting racism in health care. Then in May 2020, George Floyd was murdered a few blocks from her hospital. “What we knew about the world, many of us”—she looked out at an audience of doctors, most of them Black like her—“became very clear to lots of people. I was angry, I was bitter, I was frustrated, and I thought, What can I do? How can I help? How can I change anything?” Hawes-Van Pelt’s answer was the same one that other OB-GYNs have come to in recent years as their specialty has faced crisis after crisis: She jumped into advocacy work. She got involved with a coalition of two dozen medical groups pursuing systemic solutions to long-standing racial disparities in US women’s health. She joined Minnesota’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee, helping to analyze cases of people who die in and around childbirth—disproportionately women of color—for lessons to prevent similar deaths. Five years on, that burst of energy and determination has turned into immense strain, as the women’s health system confronts a barrage of Trump 2.0 attacks against initiatives for patients of color and research more broadly. With the White House and state governments denying the very idea of systemic racism and targeting anything that smacks of diversity, equity, and inclusion, structural change seems further away than ever, and recent gains are at risk of being stalled or erased.  That daunting new reality hung over the recent annual meeting of the 60,000-member American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the leading medical organization in the US focusing on women’s reproductive health. In a sign of the times, the ACOG committee Hawes Van-Pelt was part of, formerly called the District DEI Delegation, had a new, less contentious name: the Collective Action Advancing Respect & Equity Delegation.  At the meeting in May, Hawes-Van Pelt addressed a roomful of colleagues about health equity challenges. Even with federal funding slashed for research and large-scale health initiatives, she reminded them, they still have the power to fight bias in meaningful ways: by listening to patients, by being honest and respectful, by showing empathy and grace. Unlike research and medical education, she said, “this doesn’t require funding. This is change that we can make as individuals in our own practices.” > The clouds began gathering during the first Trump administration, as Covid > killed Black and brown people at disproportionate rates, laying bare the > racism and inequities that permeate American public health. It was a message heard often at this year’s ACOG conference. In an ordinary year, the meeting attracts thousands of people who come to brush up on topics from menstruation to menopause—and, of course, to schmooze. This year in Minneapolis, many of the conversations were about how providers in one of the most politicized fields in medicine are weathering an unprecedented series of storms. The clouds began gathering during the first Trump administration, as Covid killed Black and brown people at disproportionate rates, laying bare the racism and inequities that permeate American public health. Just as the pandemic was fading, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ushering in a wave of state laws criminalizing abortion providers and making routine care for pregnant patients infinitely more complicated. States likewise began ramping up attacks on transgender care, which is often provided by OB-GYNs.  Even before Donald Trump was reelected, conservatives had ACOG in their sights. Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page blueprint for a second Trump administration—calls out the organization by name, referring to some of its members as “pro-abortion ideologues” for their work advising the government on what forms of birth control ought to be covered by the Affordable Care Act. At the annual meeting, ACOG’s deputy general counsel, Francisco Negron, pointed to Trump’s anti-DEI executive order that instructs agencies to investigate federal contractors as part of their efforts to stamp out “DEI programs and principles”—and specifically identifies medical associations as potential targets. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion, which we all thought was about fairness, the administration perceives as unlawful discrimination,” Negron told a packed room of physicians during a session titled “Through the Looking Glass.” The field of obstetrics and gynecology has been grappling for decades with its roots in misogyny and racism, from experiments on enslaved women conducted by J. Marion Sims (the so-called “father of modern gynecology”) in the 1840s, to the forced sterilization of Black women in the mid-1900s, to the huge disparities in maternal mortality for Black women that persist today. Dr. Sharon Malone, a prominent OB-GYN and menopause specialist in Washington, DC, devoted much of her conference keynote speech to the history of medical racism for women, including her own family’s experiences in Jim Crow Alabama. She’d read a new ACOG report on how OB-GYNs can address ethnic disparities in their field, and she commended it, she told hundreds of listeners.  “But,” she added, “how are we going to implement these things in the current environment where you can’t even say the words ‘disparity,’ ‘inequity,’ ‘women,’ ‘race’?” Health researchers knew Trump’s reelection would not bode well for their work, especially anything involving abortion or other reproductive care. But few were prepared for how quickly and ruthlessly the new Trump administration has moved to demolish much of the federal infrastructure supporting women’s and minority health. Among the catastrophic staffing cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has gutted the Division of Reproductive Health, as well as offices devoted to improving minority health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services. Critical public health information, such as recommendations for doctors on how to treat sexually transmitted infections, was scrubbed from government websites until a judge ordered it to be partially restored. The dreaded “DEI” label has been cited to cancel billions in research grants to analyze maternal and infant mortality in the Mississippi Delta; examine the connection between racism and subpar cervical cancer treatment; and scrutinize the connection between psychosocial stress and preeclampsia, a potential deadly form of pregnancy-related hypertension that is more common and severe among Black women. Researchers studying such topics were told their funding was being cut because it “no longer effectuates agency priorities.” At the ACOG conference, the impact of those and other cuts was evident in the low-grade anxiety that permeated almost every conversation. In the exhibition hall, where purveyors of speculums, IUDs, and abortion pills mingled near recruiters for rural and red-state hospitals, many people I met had lost research funding. Nearly everyone seemed to be tracking the looming cuts to Medicaid, which covers 40 percent of births and makes it possible for many hospitals in rural and low-income communities to stay open. “How are we going to be able to function?” wondered Kristin Swenson, a certified nurse midwife at the University of Washington. “The mood is ‘hold on, button up, batten down.’ Our jobs are going to get harder.” > “How are we going to be able to function? The mood is ‘hold on, button up, > batten down.’ Our jobs are going to get harder.” Several physicians said they were too worried about retaliation by their employers, or the federal government, to talk to me about how their jobs have been affected by the new administration. Multiple doctors shared their frustration at not being permitted to advocate against the Trump cuts. “We need constituents advocating, because researchers are muzzled,” said a Texas OB-GYN, adding that his institution was afraid of being targeted like Harvard or Columbia universities. Slashing federal anti-hunger programs like food stamps “would be devastating to my patients,” said a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Cleveland, who treats patients with high-risk pregnancies; poorer overall health tends to make pregnancy more dangerous. She asked to speak anonymously because she has worries of her own: Her research funding has been put on hold, and her lawyers recently advised her not to leave the US to visit her home country of Canada. Another doctor, wearing rainbow glasses, told me that her hospital had learned that women in the community were choosing to give birth at home because they worried they could be arrested by immigration agents at the hospital.  Dr. Caroline Cochrane, an OB-GYN affiliated with Wake Forest University in North Carolina, told me about how, when the Trump cuts started, she was nearly ready to submit an 80-page proposal to the National Institutes of Health to study inequities in menopause care. The study would have used focus groups and surveys to ask Black and Hispanic women—who experience earlier, more severe, and longer-lasting menopause symptoms—about the challenges they encountered getting treatment, with the goal of designing a solution. But when the White House started gutting research funding, Cochrane realized her proposal contained too many “forbidden words”: “I had a whole section in there on how Black and Hispanic women have historically been excluded from research,” she said wryly. Now, she’s trying to figure out whether she can salvage any part of the proposal. Her job depends on NIH funding a portion of her salary, she told me. “My whole career up until now is in jeopardy of losing its research focus.” Studies involving the LGBTQ community, which experiences its own pernicious health disparities, are likewise being defunded. Dr. Brent Monseur, a Stanford University OB-GYN, says he’s lost the NIH grant he needs to keep conducting research at his one-of-a-kind academic center, which helps queer people create families using techniques like in vitro fertilization and surrogacy. “LGBTQ family-building is still a very nascent research field,” Monsieur told me. “There are still many things we don’t know, even very basic epidemiology, like who is using these services? How are they paying for these services? What are their clinical outcomes? What are the best treatment plans for specific populations?” With the Trump cuts, “there’s going to be a pause on all of that research generationally,” Monseur said, forcing him to choose between researching a less politicized topic or leaving academia to work at a private fertility clinic. Not that such work doesn’t carry its own risks in the current tumultuous environment: The weekend of the ACOG conference, a car bomber attacked a fertility clinic serving LGBTQ families in Palm Springs, California, injuring four people and killing himself. An issue of particular concern to many of the people at the ACOG conference was maternal mortality. Among high-income countries, the United States has by far the highest rate of maternal deaths, the vast majority of which are considered preventable. Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. During his first term in 2018, spurred by major journalistic investigations about maternal mortality and years of ACOG lobbying, Trump signed the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act, routing funding through the CDC to state maternal mortality review committees like the one Hawes-Van Pelt joined in Minnesota. Those committees, dubbed MMRCs, identify and analyze causes of deaths among pregnant people and new mothers, then enter the information into a CDC-hosted database, allowing researchers to look for trends and design interventions. (Since 2020, the list of potential contributing factors to be analyzed has included discrimination, interpersonal racism, and structural racism.) At a meeting on maternal mortality prevention at the ACOG conference, doctors worried aloud about the CDC withdrawing from this work. “Preelection, it was easier to get in touch with CDC and have them meet with us,” the leader of a maternal mortality working group reported. Others raised concerns about the national database—could ACOG take it over if the CDC stopped funding it? “That’s a really complicated question,” an ACOG official responded. “I am actually hoping that it doesn’t come down to that, quite frankly.” MMRCs are in a politically delicate position. As Anna Claire Vollers has reported at Stateline, Idaho disbanded its committee and Arkansas created a new one after MMRCs in both states recommended extending Medicaid coverage to new mothers for a full year after giving birth—a reflection of data showing that most maternal deaths happen in the postpartum period. In November, Georgia dismissed all 32 members of its MMRC after ProPublica identified two women who had died as a result of the state’s six-week abortion ban using confidential MMRC documents. In Texas, officials appointed a leading anti-abortion activist to its MMRC and ordered the committee not to review maternal deaths for a two-year period following implementation of the state’s near-total abortion ban in 2022.  I reached out to ACOG for background information about the organization’s work on racial health disparities and received a two-page statement by its new president, Dr. Steven Fleischman, who practices in New Haven, Connecticut, and teaches at the Yale School of Medicine. ACOG has been working with the federal government since the 1980s on efforts to reduce maternal mortality, he said. Over the last several years, the medical association has created a number of initiatives designed to reduce racial bias throughout women’s health, from new clinical guidelines to medical training. Much of that work is now “in jeopardy,” he acknowledges: “We are concerned that the sweeping policy changes and spending cuts coming out of the administration will only cause us to backslide on all the progress made.” > “We are concerned that the sweeping policy changes and spending cuts coming > out of the administration will only cause us to backslide on all the progress > made.” MMRCs and the national database are among the programs at risk under Trump, Fleischman said. “Realizing that these vital programs could lose funding or be eliminated entirely is deeply concerning and will hamper our ability as a country to track critical maternal health outcomes data and end racial health disparities.” Also vulnerable is a program, the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health, that provides training and assistance to hospital systems to improve responses to life-threatening emergencies and prevent maternal deaths. “HHS contracts have been integral to ACOG advancing this work across the country, and we are worried that reduced resources would stymie our efforts at these local levels,” Fleishman said. Malone, in her keynote speech at the ACOG conference, told the story of her mother giving birth to eight children starting in the 1930s. The treatment her mother received in hospital maternity wards in Mobile, Alabama, was so unpleasant that after the first two babies, she opted to deliver at home. “I don’t think that she had an experience at either of those places that was really something that made her feel cared for or seen,” Malone said. Back then, around 1 in 100 American women died in or around childbirth—a much higher maternal mortality rate than today (about 19 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2024). But even as the number of deaths was falling, the disparity in death rates between Black and white mothers has only widened. Malone urged the audience to keep fighting for health equity, despite the challenges of the current political environment. “There are things that we control,” she implored. “We have to address how we as physicians deal with patients—what are our implicit biases about why should one person have something and someone else should not?”   “We do not have an engaged federal partner, so we’re going to have to do it on our own,” she added. Instead of looking to Washington for help, “we go to states, we go to legislators, we go to our local health departments, public-private partnerships, all of that.” The answer, Malone said, “is not to do nothing. We can’t afford to do nothing.”

President Donald Trump’s second term has swung a wrecking ball at diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and programs throughout the country. Few writers seem better suited to explain this unique moment in America than Nikole Hannah-Jones. A New York Times journalist and Howard University professor, Hannah-Jones has spent years studying and shaping compelling—and at times controversial—narratives about American history. In 2019, she created The 1619 Project, a series of stories and essays that placed the first slave ship that arrived in Virginia at the center of the US’ origin story. Today, the Trump administration is pushing against that kind of historical reframing while dismantling federal policies designed to address structural racism. Hannah-Jones says she’s been stunned by the speed of Trump’s first few months. “We haven’t seen the federal government weaponized against civil rights in this way” since the turn of the century, Hannah-Jones says. “We’ve not lived in this America before. And we are experiencing something that, if you study history, it’s not unpredictable, yet it’s still shocking that we’re here.” On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks to Hannah-Jones about the rollback of DEI and civil rights programs across the country, the ongoing battle to reframe American history, and whether this will lead to another moment of rebirth for Black Americans. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

One particularly surreal aspect of Donald Trump threatening the tax-exempt status of Harvard, one of the nation’s oldest and foremost educational institutions—and excluding it from federal research funding for refusing to heed the administration’s oversight demands—is the fact that even some of the nation’s most hateful and antidemocratic entities qualify as tax-exempt charities. As I explain in my book, Jackpot: > A 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation is broadly defined as an organization with > religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes. There > are charities dedicated to “fostering appreciation” for camellias and > “promoting the medium of American mime.” (The latter, last I checked, had more > than $6 million in assets.) In 2017, according to one investigative outlet, > the National Christian Foundation—one of the largest faith-based donor- > advised funds—distributed more than $19 million of its donors’ money to > tax-exempt charities that were anti-LGBTQ, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant. > > Among the NCF’s leading recipients is Alliance Defending Freedom, a network of > Christian lawyers that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate > group for its antigay activities. The Alliance collects tens of millions in > tax-exempt donations each year. It has expressed support for foreign laws > criminalizing sodomy, represented business owners in court who refuse to serve > LGBTQ customers, opposed transgender troops, and even disputed that the 1998 > murder of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man, in Laramie, Wyoming, was a hate > crime. I bring this all up because acting US Attorney Ed Martin, Trump’s ill-fated pick for permanent US Attorney for the Washington, DC, district, apparently had a cozy relationship with the white nationalist group VDare. According to a 2024 report from Media Matters, Martin has called himself a “big admirer” of the nonprofit group. (His nomination appears doomed, albeit for unrelated reasons.) Media Matters wrote: > Martin also repeatedly hosted VDare leader and white nationalist Peter > Brimelow on his now-defunct radio program The Ed Martin Movement. During an > episode that aired on November 29, 2018, Martin praised Brimelow as “a guy > worth listening to” and told him, “I’m always glad to give you a voice, you’re > always welcome here.” VDare, which suspended its activities last July, was an active tax-exempt charity during Trump’s first term. In 2018, too, the Trump administration reinstated the tax-exempt status of white nationalist Richard Spencer‘s National Policy Institute, which had its status revoked automatically for failing to file mandatory 990 tax returns for three years running. It is telling that a president who never questioned the tax-exempt status of white nationalist groups is now suggesting his IRS might take a hard look at Harvard’s. Of course, even that simple suggestion would seem to violate federal law, which states explicitly (emphasis mine): “It shall be unlawful for any applicable person”—the president, vice president, any of their staffers, or any cabinet member—”to request, directly or indirectly, any officer or employee of the Internal Revenue Service to conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer with respect to the tax liability of such taxpayer.” (The law was passed post-Watergate to ensure that no administration could weaponize the IRS as President Richard Nixon sought to do.) Even if Harvard has some issues to work out related to alleged antisemitism, US taxpayers continue to subsidize nonprofits that exist largely to stoke anti-immigrant and religious hatred. If we are compelled to support these kinds of groups in the name of “education,” we’d best be compelled to also support legitimate institutions of higher learning. As I wrote in the book: > Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who slaughtered those Black parishioners in > Charleston, wrote that he was motivated by “black on white” crime propaganda > he discovered on the website of the nonprofit Council of Conservative > Citizens, one of whose former board members, a self-described “race realist” > named Jared Taylor, runs the like-minded New Century Foundation, another > tax-exempt nonprofit. VDare Foundation, a vehemently anti-immigrant journalism > nonprofit, has collected more than $5 million over the past decade. Its > website features headlines such as “Milwaukee Shooting: Six Out of Eleven > Mass Shootings in 86% White Wisconsin Are by Minorities or Immigrants” and > “NYPD Releases Pic of Suspect in Tessa Majors Killing. Guess What? He’s > Black.”  Taylor’s New Century Foundation also appears to be inactive these days, and an entirely unrelated nonprofit exists under the same name. When I reached Taylor by phone circa 2020, he told me he disagreed with Roof’s motive of starting a race war (“that’s immoral”), but said “his grievances were understandable.” Taylor also disputed the Southern Poverty Law Center’s characterization of the Council of Conservative Citizens and New Century as white nationalists, saying, “I call myself a ‘race realist’ and a “white advocate.’ ” Alas, our current, Orwellian, administration—with its nasty scapegoating of immigrants and clumsy attempts to erase the historical contributions of women, LGBTQ people, and nonwhites from the public commons under the guise of eliminating “DEI”—has proved itself a “white advocate” at the expense of just about everyone else.